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March 23, 2006
Beware of your vocabulary
Last night some associates and I were bemoaning the proliferation of obfuscation instigated by the intentional propagation of technical jargon in modern-day communication. Or rather—to phrase it more clearly and accurately—we were complaining about the overuse of business doublespeak. I see this in two forms on the web. Some writers choose to muddy their messages by peppering their sentences with big words. While these words may demonstrate the writer's vast vocabulary, they can often confuse the reader, particularly if these words are less accurate than their smaller, yet equally powerful counterparts. Another issue that concerns me is the appropriate use...
March 06, 2006
To Blog or not to Blog
If you are reading this, then you probably know that http://blog.case.edu offers blog space to faculty, staff, students and alumni for personal and/or academic/business use. If you are either a blog author or a blog reader you are familiar with the wealth of opinions that can be found through a daily perusal of http://planet.case.edu. You may think of your blog as being part of the Case blogosphere, but distinct from your other Web pages. Today I'd like to consider when and why to blur that distinction by incorporating a blog into your regular Web presence. By using a blog in...
Podcasting macht Spaß! (Podcasting is fun!)
Saturday afternoon I sat chortling on my couch as Übel Knübel (a teenage boy played by an Evil Knieval figure), flirtatious Gummi-Bears, and a pair of rubber shoes tried to teach me German. This was not the latest in children's progamming on WVIZ, but rather a new podcast from http://www.mygermanclass.com/. The primitive animation and kitsch story lines, were so amusing, and so distinctly German, that I was compelled to watch all 10 episodes at once. Having taken 2 years of German in college (much of which I have since forgotten) I was able to understand most of the plots,...